Trailfire

It does seem that the explosion of Web 2.0 tools have slowed down. Here is one that I have played with for awhile but just came up in a conversation today.
I am someone whose mind has begun to mimic the web. I jump from idea to idea...each one building on the discussion of the last. Well, there is a tool which can help someone understand my path of thinking...or you can take them on a journey with you through the web.
The tool is trailfire...it hasn't seemed to take off a great deal. The idea is great though. You make comments on a series of webpages which then people can follow through the web. This is more than just a listing of sites. It is a listing, with comments in a particular order. Perhaps not great for sharing general topic areas....but for helping students work through a topic that builds on itself, this is a great idea. It provides scaffolding without limiting what the students can go and look at.
Here is an example of one I put together trying to find best practices in blogging, starting from an excellent pre-calc blog. Follow the trail.
Happy exploring!!
J:)

Panoptic what??

Here I am reading a book about studying the way people carry on discourses in our modern age. The point I just hit upon was worth thinking about. The authors (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) describe a traditional classroom as set up for optimal observation of the students. The term actually comes from a conceptual design for a prison. The idea put forth by some theorists is that schools and classrooms are laid out similarly to this panoptic philosophy behind the panopticon. Now, I realize that perhaps many students would agree with the idea that a classroom is like a prison...but that is not the primary point. The suggestion is sometimes made that with the Web 2.0 or new technologies, we move away from this all controlling, centralized on the teacher approach. Yet, one conversation I recently had during a Skype call with two researchers looking at new literacies (Lankshear and Knoble) was the concern of many that on the web, with youTube and blogs, we are actually creating a situation in which our lives are constatnly under surveillance. With period by period attendance reported to a database which can be viewed by parents online, even the right of each student to skip that boring class is being placed under surveillance (that was a tongue in cheek comment:)
So what is going on here...are we more under the watchful eye in the f2f classroom or online? My thoughts?? Its not about the classroom location. It is about the context. That is it is about the culture, mindset, beliefs, history, set-up of the context of interaction. Once again the role of technology as being different by its nature is overstated. Technology provides the opportunity for difference...it does not require it.
Soap box is done for today....tomorrow will actually go on a trip through an eLearning experience.
Explore on....
J:)

Where are we really?

This blog has been struggling to happen...well I have decided it will now happen. Let me quickly recap the past couple of months since I had decided to switch to this space (and then didn't).
- Ran a Second Life project: Rural school, web design class, cool teacher. What did we learn from this? Well this exploration was like going into uncharted territory. The issues involved with trying to have a program that required weekly updates, high bandwidth and a fairly sophisticated class was hacking through the jungle. Luckily we had a great group helping us. Vital Labs, from Ohio University, worked with our students within second life and through skype. (of course with Second Life now, we could have just used the audio feature...but we were back in the silent picture days:) They were very helpful and as one might expect, we had some students take to it and others who thought it was 'stupid.' My favorite conversation was when I asked the students what they thought of the experience. First student: "It was interesting and all, but what has this got to do with web design class?" Second student: "This is the web of the future. Its like asking what does driving a car have to do with going somewhere. Its how we will do it in the real world."
Most powerful statements: student as stuck in the now as all of the rest of us (the millennials are not all "there" either..check this video out from their mouths...so there is hope for us digital immigrants), "Its how we will do it in the real world." OK...so they see that the virtual world is what the real world will be....VERY interesting.
OK...thoughts for tonight are posted...going to keep these short and sweet so I know I can keep at it.
Keep Exploring,
J:)